Early Balding May Predict Prostate Cancer

Early-onset androgenic alopecia may identify men who are at high risk of developing prostate cancer (PCa), researchers reported online in Annals of Oncology.

Philippe Giraud, MD, PhD, of Paris Descartes University and the European Georges Pompidou Hospital in Paris, and colleagues conducted a 28-month study of 388 men who had been diagnosed with PCa between the ages of 46 and 84 years and 281 men without disease.

The PCa patients were twice as likely to have had androgenic alopecia at age 20 years compared with men without PCa. Early-onset alopecia was not associated with an earlier diagnosis of prostate cancer or with the development of more aggressive tumors.